PART 1: Theoretical Knowledge

Each school year begins with planning and organizing. Teachers, parents and students will all make a plan and try to estimate how the school years is about to progress. There is however one group of students who will probably attract less attention than usual and these are the gifted learners. Those who are talented, creative and innovative and at the same time, inexplicably ignored in their need to learn in a particular way.

Gifted students learn in ways, which differ and are more advanced than the ways regular learners do. Learning represents converting information into knowledge, which is then elaborated, broken down or reorganized in various ways. Gifted students learn more within a given period of time than other peers. They also form a broader, more detailed and differentiated knowledge of a topic. Furthermore, these students do not base their conclusions on explicit statements, which is the usual case, but rather on evidence and reasoning. Combining knowledge from more than one source leads towards an intuitive theory, which is not necessarily correct, but the gifted child is also able to validate its new knowledge, change it accordingly or reject it if it is wrong.

If giftedness is considered from the point of view of its manifestation in the classroom, we can identify verbally gifted children, who make conclusions about the direction of the teaching and leave the teacher and their peers with the impression that they are ahead of what is happening in the classroom, and visual-spatially gifted children, who formulate more lateral or creative concepts, which are often unexpected and questioning the teaching process or approach. The latter students – the visual-spatially gifted ones – are frequently not academically or socially successful, i.e., they often fall within the category considered as being twice-exceptional.